Vengeance of the Vendors

     Nothing in my life experience prepared me for the aggressiveness of the street vendors in Antigua, Guatemala.  A famous (and probably fictitious) quote from Julius Caesar is: veni, vidi, vici--I came, I saw, I conquered.  A fitting Latin phrase to match the Latin American peddlers would be: veni, vidi, vendi--I came, I saw, I sold.  On the streets around our hotel there were street vendors with DVDs, cell phones etc., we would politely tell them no and they backed away, not so in Antigua, the colonial capital of Central America.  The Guatemala City vendors had the annoyance factor of an occasional gnat compared to the starving mosquitoes persistence of the Antigua sellers. 
     They certainly weren't physically intimidating, some of the older Mayan descent women were four feet tall.  The children, however, used shameless cuteness intimidation, that is why I wound up with five wooden flutes.  I wanted one.  Women would approach me (as if Reed had some sort of peddler repellent on) wearing a sling like you might carry a baby in, full of scarves and table runners which they would pull out one at a time to display the beauty of the embroidery.  I thought of the sales clerks back home who want to see your money before unfolding something for you to look at and even get annoyed when you do it yourself.  Guatemalans are into table runners the way Americans are into tee shirts.  They would gladly have sold me enough to fill our hotel suite, but then there wouldn't have been room for the necklaces they were also selling.  There was one tee shirt Reed was tempted to buy, it said "No I don't want to ride in your tuk tuk ( motorized rickshaw),
I don't want to buy jade and I don't want any **** cashews".  We didn't buy it because of the ****, but Reed isn't the one who needed it anyway.  There might have been more merchant mobs than usual because it was Holy Week and that is high tourist season in Central America.  Some of the irresistible urchins probably would have been in school otherwise.
     For the most part I didn't buy more souvenirs than I needed, but I had to creatively expand my list of people who might want souvenirs to make that true.  We stood firm.  Actually, we would get up and walk around the park to get away as if the sellers actually were mosquitoes. We refused to let anyone put shoe polish on our tennis shoes, I only bought one more table runner than I intended, I didn't melt and buy an ice cream for the adorable shoe shine boy, we didn't ride in the rickety horse drawn carriages or tuk tuks and we didn't sample the **** cashews.  I needn't have bothered replacing my 1970 Spanish-English dictionary, all I needed to know how to say was "No, gracias".  I got lots of practice saying it, but I was not convincing enough to produce even a thin layer of peddler repellent.  I came, I saw, I bought (it sounds more impressive in Latin).